


To Tell the Truth

by JessaLRynn



Category: Doctor Who (2005), Torchwood
Genre: Canon Temporary Character Death, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Gen, Immortality, introspective
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-26
Updated: 2018-07-26
Packaged: 2019-06-16 11:26:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15436029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JessaLRynn/pseuds/JessaLRynn
Summary: Captain Jack introspective. The results of an oft-used catch phrase, and what it means in the end.





	To Tell the Truth

**Author's Note:**

> This work has been revised from the original posting. I'm better at what I do now. So is Jack.

Jack said, "See you in Hell," for the very last time and ran off to face the Daleks. After that, he found out something that no human being should have to know for certain: Hell is not, in fact, a place at all.

Hell turned out to open up with a sound - the sound of the TARDIS leaving without him. Then, Hell immediately began to justify things. They must have believed him dead. That made sense, really, because he was reasonably certain he'd been dead. Maybe Rose had been in danger - she would always take priority, and Jack admitted to himself that he preferred it that way.

As cliched as it sounded, there turned out to be an awful lot of hope in Hell. He hoped that they were both safe. He hoped they would come for him soon. He hoped those frightened people didn't look too hard for explanations or survivors. He hoped - terribly and desperately - that the Vortex manipulator worked right. He hoped it worked _right now_.

He hoped this wasn't really the 1800's, because that's definitely what it looked like.

He discovered very quickly that the problems with Hell weren't the ones he'd been told all his life. Hell wasn't too hot - it was usually far too cold. Hell wasn't crowded - it was bitterly lonely and isolated, even in a lover's arms. Hell didn't have endless reminders of his mortal sins - that two year gap in his memory still kept him up more nights than almost anything that happened before or since. Hell didn't even seem to have demons to torment him - he rather thought he could have done with one or two of those, actually, because Hell was stultifyingly boring. (He later learned his lesson far too well about that, too, but it's another story entirely.)

The one thing Hell did have that he'd been warned about was the incessant guilt. Still, even this was as backward as everything else, because he wasn't guilty for what he did, but for what he didn't do.

He didn't do anything but sign up during World War One. He walked through the 20s and 30s looking at every Jew and Gypsy he came across , trying to memorize their faces, and muttering "I'm sorry." He had to avoid World War Two entirely this time around, since he was already there, somewhere. He wandered through protests but didn't dare lead them. He popped in at UNIT but didn't even try to lend a hand. He stayed away from Cape Canaveral. The Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall both rose and fell without him. He left America to return to Britain before September 11, 2001. He never went to India, left Asia Minor to its own devices. He spent years hiding in Africa, but couldn't save anyone. He couldn't risk getting involved in any of it and it injured his conscience every single day. 

Hell did, thankfully, have a great many albeit pithy distractions. He spent the 1950s forcing himself to learn to play piano. He took a PhD in Physics from Harvard, for the sake of certain high level arguments. He sorted through every word in entire libraries, simply because he had the time. He found subtle ways to pepper quiet culture with his pain and his reality. ( _Doctor My Eyes_ will always haunt him.) He collected Superman comic books and wondered why he couldn't be faster than the speeding bullets that occasionally punctuated his endless life with a pointless sort of deathishness.

He memorized entire movies, even bad ones, because he had the time, because they had been lost in the future, in his past, and some of them should have belonged to eternity. He found an answer, of sorts, for what he had become. It was there, in what he already knew like Shakespeare and Marlowe. It was there in moments that slipped through fingers like sand. It was everywhere, sometimes in an old story, sometimes in a play, sometimes in compassion or fear. Sometimes in the pain he felt for jaded soldiers and jilted friends, for broken heroes and lost children, for women in horrible situations and men who didn't know where they went wrong. Sometimes, in sympathy for anyone, occasionally even for the villains, and once for the very Devil himself.

He said goodbye to everyone he ever met. He also, because he wasn't stupid, tried to stop loving them all so much. He failed.

He stayed the same. Still flirted because he could, still stole and cheated and lied. He took solace, as he had before, that he was doing it for the best of reasons - there were some people who really did not need to know anywhere near as much as they thought they did, and her Majesty's secret Torchwood certainly fit that description. This time, at least, he was right.

He changed. Didn't take to flippancy so easily, knew now so terribly what he had lost. "Go to Hell, Jack," was all the invitation he ever needed to fix the speaker with a piercing stare (he had learned that so well from the ultimate expert) and reply. "This is Hell," he would say. "I'm never out of it."

Someday, he was going to have to say that whole speech, how he'd adapted it in his head, from the devil who first said it, to who he was now.

It never happened, not for decades. He began, so slowly, to wonder if he could begin to maybe... probably not. He'd made yet another group of young, tragic friends (whom he knew secretly distrusted or even hated him sometimes.) He'd learned once and for all that just because he was in Hell didn't mean he ever wanted to encounter the beings who actually belonged there. He'd fallen in love (again, and he kept trying not to, dammit). He'd spent no more than a single, peeled raw and dripping day out of Hell.

After that, the moment finally came, when he had to explain himself, when only he and the Devil really understood what he meant.

The Master leered at him with ill-diguised fascination and touched his face with a hand that lingered. A sure sign of the reborn Time Lord's utter madness, it didn't bode well for the days to come.

"Don't worry, precious Jack," the lunatic told him, his voice soft and gentle, like a lover's caress. His eyes were on fire with crazed zeal, and an insanity humankind was not meant to comprehend, never mind bear the wrath of. "I am his superior in all ways. I'm sure I'll find just the thing to send you screaming into Hell."

Jack smiled back at him, feeling curiously like a saint girding up his prayers to endure all the torments of the damned for God's sake. Maybe he was. Maybe that was why.

It made such achingly beautiful sense.

The Master watched him, expectant. Probably, he thought Jack would spew forth venom and threats and confidence in the Savior of Men. But Jack was used to this, had spent ages preparing for this moment, and the words were perfect, like a gift.

He smiled, proud and dying yet again. "This is Hell. I'm never out of it. You think that I, who saw the face of God and tasted the joys of heaven, am not tormented with ten thousand Hells in being deprived of it?"

They both knew what he meant, that was the whole point. It wasn't the ephemeral life-after-death that Jack could never believe in, having been dead - that the Master would never believe in, being a Time Lord and unable until now to ever completely die. No, the Master knew exactly what and, moreover, _who_ Jack meant.

They stared at each other, Jack now silent, calm, and wondering, the Master drumming rapidly against the wall with his fingertips, so dangerously deranged that the very air around him reeked of irredeemable psychosis.

The Time Lord killed Jack six times before he calmed down from that rage. But everyone else was, for the moment, safe and unharmed. Torture was wasted on those who were never away from it. Jack still smiled beatifically through a split lip and blackened eyes. 

To tell the truth, it was all worth it.


End file.
